Ed Brill

Well, it took me a while to realize it, but with a couple of days' distance, I've finalized realized that Monday's eWeek story was Microsoft's annual Lotusphere spoiler.  It's funny how my link to that article spawned more than two dozen comments, yet the all-good-news story in Network World seems not to have hit the radar.  Shows how a good controversy stirs up conversation, while good news just kind of passes by.
Anyway, that eWeek story isn't really bothering me as much as it did two days ago.  First of all, I've been able to learn that the claim "nearly all members" of the Lotus Workflow team are at Microsoft is inaccurate.  Wolfgang is there, sure, but it's not like he went directly to MS from Lotus (nor did the two MS employees quoted in the article, for that matter).  You can see Yuri's comment in that thread; a heck of a lot of the workflow team is still at Lotus or IBM.  Second, there's always a difference between announcement and execution, so one article in the press isn't keeping me up at night (heck, I went to bed last night at 7:30 PM -- must be the pre-LS stress).
Anyway, I also notice now that there are a few people from Microsoft registered for Lotusphere.  Don't recognize all the names -- in fact the two most obvious 'softies I would expect to be there are not on the list... not even under a different company name.  Not sure about aliases, of course -- maybe I've mentioned S&S Consulting, their 2003 alias, enough that they went after a new one this year.  Of course, I'd like them to be honest and ethical, but maybe they still remember the year that that IBM gave Microsoft attendees at Lotusphere a different type of badge -- it was bright red.